Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
I don’t know: it’s not just the outputs posing a risk, but also the tools themselves
Yeah, that’s true. Poisoning the training corpus of models is at least a potential risk. There’s a whole field of AI security stuff out there now aimed at LLM security.
it shouldn’t require additional tools, checking for such common flaws.
Well, we are using them today for human programmers, so… :-)
No problem; I remember being delighted to learn that there was a name for the thing, years back.
Also, one other comment regarding the “change away from mechanical toggle”. If you got the machine pre-built, you may never have noticed this, but on ATX motherboards, there’s a set of pins which you fit the power and reset switch wires onto.
I mean, you can plug whatever you feel like onto those pins and stick your power and reset buttons wherever you feel like, if you don’t like the position of the existing case switch. It’s just a momentary switch. You can grab replacement ones that aren’t built into a case:
https://www.amazon.com/Warmstor-2-Pack-Computer-Supply-27-inch/dp/B074XDTVN1
Or even just get your own switches and connect the plug and wires to whatever sort of momentary switch you want. Amazon or Mouser or DigiKey will have all sorts of momentary switches.
Security is where the gap shows most clearly
So, this is an area where I’m also pretty skeptical. It might be possible to address some of the security issues by making minor shifts away from a pure-LLM system. There are (conventional) security code-analysis tools out there, stuff like Coverity. Like, maybe if one says “all of the code coming out of this LLM gets rammed through a series of security-analysis tools”, you catch enough to bring the security flaws down to a tolerable level.
One item that they highlight is the problem of API keys being committed. I’d bet that there’s already software that will run on git-commit hooks that will try to red-flag those, for example. Yes, in theory an LLM could embed them into code in some sort of obfuscated form that slips through, but I bet that it’s reasonable to have heuristics that can catch most of that, that will be good-enough, and that such software isn’t terribly difficult to write.
But in general, I think that LLMs and image diffusion models are, in their present form, more useful for generating output that a human will consume than that a CPU will consume. CPUs are not tolerant of errors in programming languages. Humans often just need an approximately-right answer, to cue our brains, which itself has the right information to construct the desired mental state. An oil painting isn’t a perfect rendition of the real world, but it’s good enough, as it can hint to us what the artist wanted to convey by cuing up the appropriate information about the world that we have in our brains.
This Monet isn’t a perfect rendition of the world. But because we have knowledge in our brain about what the real world looks like, there’s enough information in the painting to cue up the right things in our head to let us construct a mental image.
Ditto for rough concept art. Similarly, a diffusion model can get an image approximately right — some errors often just aren’t all that big a deal.
But a lot of what one is producing when programming is going to be consumed by a CPU that doesn’t work the way that a human brain does. A significant error rate isn’t good enough; the CPU isn’t going to patch over flaws and errors itself using its knowledge of what the program should do.
EDIT:
I’d bet that there’s already software that will run on git-commit hooks that will try to red-flag those, for example.
Yes. Here are instructions for setting up trufflehog to run on git pre-commit hooks to do just that.
EDIT2: Though you’d need to disable this trufflehog functionality and have some out-of-band method for flagging false positives, or an LLM could learn to bypass the security-auditing code by being trained on code that overrides false positives:
Add trufflehog:ignore comments on lines with known false positives or risk-accepted findings
I keep seeing the “it’s good for prototyping” argument they post here, in real life.
There are real cases where bugs aren’t a huge deal.
Take shell scripts. Bash is designed to make it really fast to write throwaway, often one-line software that can accomplish a lot with minimal time.
Bash is not, as a programming language, very optimized for catching corner cases, or writing highly-secure code, or highly-maintainable code. The great majority of bash code that I have written is throwaway code, stuff that I will use once and not even bother to save. It doesn’t have to handle all situations or be hardened. It just has to fill that niche of code that can be written really quickly. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. I can imagine generated code with some bugs not being such a huge problem there. If it runs once and appears to work for the inputs in that particular scenario, that may be totally fine.
Or, take test code. I’m not going to spend a lot of time making test code perfect. If it fails, it’s probably not the end of the world. There are invariably cases that I won’t have written test code for. “Good enough” is often just fine there.
And it might be possible to, instead of (or in addition to) having human-written commit messages, generate descriptions of commits or something down the line for someone browsing code.
I still feel like I’m stretching, though. Like…I feel like what people are envisioning is some kind of self-improving AI software package, or just letting an LLM go and having it pump out a new version of Microsoft Office. And I’m deeply skeptical that we’re going to get there just on the back of LLMs. I think that we’re going to need more-sophisticated AI systems.
I remember working on one large, multithreaded codebase where a developer who isn’t familiar with or isn’t following the thread-safety constraints would create an absolute maintenance nightmare for others, where you’re going to spend way more time tracking down and fixing breakages induced than you saved by them not spending time coming up to speed on the constraints that their code needs to conform to. And the existing code-generation systems just aren’t really in a great position to come up to speed on those constraints. Part of what a programmer does is, when writing code, is to look at the human-language requirements, and identify that there are undefined cases and go back and clarify the requirement with the user, or use real-world knowledge to make reasonable calls. Training an LLM to map from an English-language description to code is creating a system that just doesn’t have the capability to do that sort of thing.
But, hey, we’ll see.
I apparently actually did two of these on different occasions, using different, restricted Unicode character ranges (ones that only look at the value of the character as a whole, no subpixel rendering). Can’t find the (newer) color one, but the black-and-white one:
░
░░░░░░░
░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░
░▒▓▓▓▒▒▒░░░░░
░▒▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░ ░░░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░
░▒▓▓███▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░ ░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░
░▒▓▓▓████▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▓▒▒░░ ░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒░
░▒▓▓▓███▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒░
░▒▓▓▓█▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░
▒▓▓▓██▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓██▓▓▓▒░
░▒▓▓▓████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█▓▓▓▒░
░▒▒▓▓▓████▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░
░░▒▓▓▓▓██▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█▓▓▓░░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓███▓▓▓▒░
░▒▓▓▓▒▒░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░▒▒▓▓██▓▓▓▓▒░
▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▒░
░▒▒▒░░░░▒▒▒▒░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒░
░░▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░▒▒░
░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░▒░░
░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▓▓▓████▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒░░░░▒░░
░▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░▒▒▓▓▓▓▒▒░░░░░░░░░▒▓▓████▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░
░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒░░░▒▒▓▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░▒▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒░░▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒░
░▒▒▓▓▓▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▒▒░▒▒▒▒░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▒░░▒▒▒░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░░░░ ░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒░░░░░░ ░░░░▒▒▒▒░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒░
░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▓▓▓▒░░ ░░░░░▒▒▒░░ ░░▒▒░░░▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░
░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░░ ░░▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░░ ░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░
░▒▒▓▓▓▓▒░ ░▓▓█▓▓▓▒▒▓▓▓▒░ ░▒▒▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░
▒▒▓▒▒▒░░░▒▓███████▓██▓░ ░▒▓▓▓▒░░
▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓████▓▓████▓░ ░▒▒▒░
░▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓██████▓▒▒░░░░
░▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░
▒▒▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▒░░
░░▒▒▒▒▒▒░░
Is generated by the program with this uuencoded source:
begin 644 unicode_image.tar.xz
M_3=Z6%H```3FUK1&`@`A`18```!T+^6CX"?_!IM=`":8269IV=F-Y,!%M1>4
MZX(9LR,YMG1:D2XCM%DZ,0N4%>'\;I?0D"7/H:OI15<M6G@8HO/[&((J'=B.
MXY\G/[7D"Y)B$O)IC]DM9Y@^\4T?'9(.Z.4+7IDF/T0&\7`M5+G#=C!?(>(U
M+-C2%PZ!"(Q'Z_/D^%"[PVKX:A:OKH5WF?AQ=CD_AAS]<3<THTMC0S8FG\<A
MZ;A-_9H?)5S'YG5A?0WUQ7FR0+IS\0AEUYY9QFMY?"$);\U%_R0NK(ZZ/Y&J
MVA;@#O-P.6W8PW']0U"<S'NHB=.(/)OX[<1&UF@M8+GXPGVFQB_+K/WD01ZO
MO#+E!CK;^`V-WGH^?0V5M!IK[KR&]`IR<>6D+ONPJT6E\CZJ^KKZ,W?3O"2K
M!/GHQ&TDN';;P#UC;)+HRPH$`_8JM#ZV`\I6=,PO=U#S33IZ=R!K2IF]\1D@
M*@I6;)=1P[3ICJ%,C5VTH^%^^N7(`)5NO*-SG)Y`QA_WK>PA8;TJ+X2)EV?3
MI.G"[*>WWDZ7\Q_8`@,?X8C9YSMNGQ.S79!10SGB!PGY<3)L+A>\T4NE3RCH
M@$<!]40^I5;'[)@>$KCW3*:VMQ")"FQ!"L?^:Y5K)WM]*CV<",@L38:E&'G;
MOH/\?B8-H-/5$-+1`SZ2O6RHY>T@2+Q"LM7T32<P'/M;:&`9G%<:2]0W95K<
M\.;8"EQMW`_,%NF[4)3]`F-BE^_T2,`,VV:G?3TUJ"IH\A@>7Y8:?5[I8HAX
M/S[+K[U+U);"B>&TTWB[]4K_N9HNW6P5\,!8G[BS*%\3<$#RM"O`6C#I1>3W
ME/8D\";AO1[@@M<^$07W%./W$^^MXKWV/QE?(SEU3GAF"?/TXQ_1N>#/)-;8
M<MT]?:XBQTJ%9'[+D!X/9^"U.Y*2A(8A/AJ\!K^V\)9>''<,=_M*GQ;D4XU&
M0EL_A7==:2!F6+.18],W)'0*A8VHHT@F\^+U@*=PAW&]_UDA'O3HL,)67*56
M:4QHF]DC7*EMI@?8=/,8;'O4[2W^#V!$L.(O\+@E"I[>5AF7V].]DSR0?>4E
MX,HXX%S-A'V'+F)3(0_FX[O!VNO&D/BL`T<!(LJ,(@3!S8LJ[><9CHP*Z!1N
M*W=F7"R-"ZZ_7"_NQ:8M=&RU\7`Z`<J>2YY>W2B\R7!YX(:UE+7?[1HLZ6?B
M_$Z<[I3[+!'?["<`BV0HHVNVZ$?*E!CLQ,Q'U$5$IQ?#B#+P)WE/$$-*'U<E
M%+7[;;^I\)F++WU`\\BL@X5,*B+]OLWQ&=W!,3*4_5Z0'R\2N/\];P>]W2<(
M-7Z3$YL3&6;-"*NTT2_Z1P=4">JZT,0Y$Q`L;RU@2\X!6>NA6D:5#HOIP#H]
MH)2I8$WFSU,1M9OC73J.1T1-YWD[%EH?1E*H#MV/[+5HSKGU.-%-'Z)QI=$\
MV>24Q6&KMA*-=L#[#I[2'0$86N)&8E/==`F@,S#5,`)(-KDT6A9IK-/%6OA@
M@FI$$#7G>&.Z!8[?8:F==P>HX>WF&.?(9V6^WM`J[CVD`L]9<&\6P_U?*WN`
MLI*_M*H;SP58M&#X!>*U*^J*XO@UT"&SIGH1%(K-=7DN@=HD6`S2EET,60JV
MI_\%)%6Q_^3CW_5`HQ;G084_7J0'F9DDH*%`SY*.D1BP`"D_QO=5,F?$-HAG
M_FP7H+LUTX`^%F-[SV(C'N*+AXE=&!+'OT$)RYGQ/HX,L8W(D%G9J=P!6+*$
M)F20)=%>9ZI).Z0`I'T/OT#SUR_:(O0U1*2-:,\D0S52^NI?HL69"POCNH&X
M_HXLQZB3EL-Z<)4.!<<BDJX3H"Q`L'&"RLO/%]17EV.5R@/$,%GYE#U(,Z'.
M6#]?M?@0VYB%WU2-4E:Z&9RN,"SCQAYJ70='?0`L5JC6GG#:1BG]DBCY;N)<
M>[;>JU-P]W=*RQG_KX;[>Y-0O.>_BS[M!=3Y#98EA`S8J/\1S=Z..*RC^;+U
M!.(#>E-V^?_+/M323Q,+EM-95M%CT#G[XO0FH/`.&`__EU<3\=+#>7?FR*NY
M9MA;$1+KD8?V@Y8XE7`(*;.N\KEF1]T4!OYS1+%#*S9&[0-#E"FRGA^\L[^A
M\76@2CMV<J_S92KW%;UO$.=R!3!P]OD.WD@*ZE(.;>H)8L]IMC;<YHPNH343
MY,JGKBM7M:!:S]$UJ7Y-/A'>Z]^7LV*Y.]N\MN_#%%%>)IH_A_:G46]+E.M;
MUA@I>99IP916P;7A48N3VF+;&!__1Q<QF8AU`XF-LJ./^6J+@+JCLICOF=I-
M.U"KKV.._JR/;P(````4=99=LD1P/P`!MPV`4```*JOOO;'$9_L"``````19
!6@``
`
end
I’ve also seen various programs that use the Braille Unicode characters for higher-resolution bitmap rendering, like mapscii, and I suspect that someone’s probably written software to convert to that.
I was kind of interested in doing this for Unicode a while back, which has the potential to provide for a lot more possible characters and thus a lot more-accurate renditions. If you don’t care about real-time operation, I suspect that you can do this with off-the-shelf software by just writing a small amount of code to generate an image for each character — a shell script driving ImageMagick could do it — and then feeding it into photomosaic software, like metapixel.
The major limitation is that unless you’re just interested in doing this for the text-based aesthetic and are actually rendering and presenting an image to the end user — think something like Effulgence RPG, Warsim, Armoured Commander II, Armoured Commander, Cogmind, SanctuaryRPG, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Stone Story RPG, Roots of Harmony, and so forth — you can’t control the font that the thing is rendered in on the end user’s computer. And the accuracy of the rendering degrades the more the typeface used on an end user’s computer differs from your own.
It’d probably be possible to build some kind of system that does take into account the differences for different typefaces, scores characters higher based on checking for character similarity across different typefaces.
Note that there are also at least two existing libraries out there — what I can think of off the top of my head — that will do image-to-ASCII conversion — aalib and libcaca, the latter of which has color support. I also posted a tiny program some time back to generate images using the colored Unicode tiles, and I imagine that someone out there probably has a website that does the same thing.
control of the world’s rare earth minerals
China’s dominance isn’t really because China has exclusive access to known reserves of it. It’s because China dominates the processing industry for these. I’d guess that at least some of that is probably due to more-permissive environmental regulations.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/23/nx-s1-5475137/china-rare-earth-elements
Many so-called rare earth elements are actually quite common, and they are mined globally, but China has a near-monopoly on refining them for use in everyday electronics, like smartphones and speakers, as well as for crucial defense systems, like fighter jets.
https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/how-china-processes-rare-earths-what-review-really-shows/
Environmental performance differs regionally—higher impacts at Bayan Obo (legacy tailings, fluorine management), lower-impact circuits in Sichuan, and improving in-situ protocols in the South. Nonetheless, wastewater, ammonium-nitrogen, and tailings management remain significant sustainability challenges. And we know the devastating state of Myanmar’s heavy rare earth mining operations.
There was a famous bug that made it into 95 and 98, a tick counter that caused the system to crash after about a month. It was in there so long because there were so many other bugs causing stability problems that it wasn’t obvious.
I will say that classic MacOS, which is what Apple was doing at the time, was also pretty unstable. Personal computer stability really improved in the early 2000s a lot. Mac OS X came out and Microsoft shifted consumers onto a Windows-NT-based OS.
EDIT:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
A bizarre and probably obscure bug will crash some Windows computers after about a month and a half of use.
The problem, which affects both Microsoft Windows 95 and 98 operating systems, was confirmed by the company in an alert to its users last week.
“After exactly 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows 95-based computer may stop responding,” Microsoft warned its users, without much further explanation. The problem is apparently caused by a timing algorithm, according to the company.
My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.
I use Linux, so I haven’t personally run into it, but is that just because of the Aero interface stuff? IIRC a lot of that can be disabled.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/molly-guard
molly-guard
A physical barrier to protect something from unwanted contact, especially a shield to prevent accidental tripping of an emergency shutdown or power switch.
There is a plastic molly-guard covering the escalator’s shutdown button to prevent little kids from pushing it and stopping the escalator.
Etymology
From Molly (female given name) + guard.
Originally a Plexiglas cover improvised for the Big Red Switch on an IBM 4341 mainframe after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) tripped it twice in one day. Later generalised to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.
E.g.
https://www.amazon.com/SJZBIN-Dustproof-Protector-Computer-Desktop/dp/B0C4DVCWN6
If databases are involved they usually offer some method of dumping all data to some kind of text file. Usually relying on their binary data is not recommended.
It’s not so much text or binary. It’s because a normal backup program that just treats a live database file as a file to back up is liable to have the DBMS software write to the database while it’s being backed up, resulting in a backed-up file that’s a mix of old and new versions, and may be corrupt.
Either:
or:
In general, if this is a concern, I’d tend to favor #2 as an option, because it’s an all-in-one solution that deals with all of the problems of files changing while being backed up: DBMSes are just a particularly thorny example of that.
Full disclosure: I mostly use ext4 myself, rather than btrfs. But I also don’t run live DBMSes.
EDIT: Plus, #2 also provides consistency across different files on the filesystem, though that’s usually less-critical. Like, you won’t run into a situation where you have software on your computer update File A, then does a sync(), then updates File B, but your backup program grabs the new version of File B but then the old version of File A. Absent help from the filesystem, your backup program won’t know where write barriers spanning different files are happening.
In practice, that’s not usually a huge issue, since fewer software packages are gonna be impacted by this than write ordering internal to a single file, but it is permissible for a program, under Unix filesystem semantics, to expect that the write order persists there and kerplode if it doesn’t…and a traditional backup won’t preserve it the way that a backup with help from the filesystem can.
In all fairness, while this is a particularly bad case, the fact that it’s often very difficult to safely fiddle with environment variables at runtime in a process, but very convenient as a way to cram extra parameters into a library have meant that a lot of human programmers who should know better have created problems like this too.
IIRC, setting the timezone for some of the Posix time APIs on Linux has the same problem, and that’s a system library. And IIRC SDL and some other graphics libraries, SDL and IIRC Linux 3D stuff, have used this as a way to pass parameters out-of-band to libraries, which becomes a problem when programs start dicking with it at runtime. I remember reading some article from someone who had been banging into this on Linux gaming about how various programs and libraries for games would setenv() to fiddle with them, and races associated with that were responsible for a substantial number of crashes that they’d seen.
setenv() is not thread-safe or signal-safe. In general, reading environment variables in a program is fine, but messing with them in very many situations is not.
searches
Yeah, the first thing I see is someone talking about how its lack of thread-safety is a problem for TZ, which is the time thing that’s been a pain for me a couple times in the past.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38342642
Back on your issue:
Claude, being very smart and very good at drawing a straight line between two points, wrote code that took the authentication token from the HTTP request header, modified the process’s environment variables, then called the library
for the uninitiated - a process’s environment variables are global. and HTTP servers are famously pretty good at dealing with multiple requests at once.
Note also that a number of webservers used to fork to handle requests — and I’m sure that there are still some now that do so, though it’s certainly not the highest-performance way to do things — and in that situation, this code could avoid problems.
searchs
It sounds like Apache used to and apparently still can do this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/102vqa2/why_does_apache_spew_a_new_process_for_each/
But it does highlight one of the “LLMs don’t have a broad, deep understanding of the world, and that creates problems for coding” issues that people have talked about. Like, part of what someone is doing when writing software is identifying situations where behavior isn’t defined and clarifying that, either via asking for requirements to be updated or via looking out-of-band to understand what’s appropriate. An LLM that’s working by looking at what’s what commonly done in its training set just isn’t in a good place to do that, and that’s kinda a fundamental limitation.
I’m pretty sure that the general case of writing software is AI-hard, where the “AI” referred to by the term is an artificial general intelligence that incorporates a lot of knowledge about the world. That is, you can probably make an AI to program write software, but it won’t be just an LLM, of the “generative AI” sort of thing that we have now.
There might be ways that you could incorporate an LLM into software that can write software themselves. But I don’t think that it’s just going to be a raw “rely on an LLM taking in a human-language set of requirements and spitting out code”. There are just things that that can’t handle reasonably.
Aside from the issues that the article notes, I am skeptical that this is gonna work from a business protection standpoint, if protectionism is the state’s goal.
Say the issue is that VW cannot make EVs in Europe competitive with BYD in China. Labor or environmental regulation costs drive their costs up. Say BYD can make a car for 75% of what VW can.
The EU says “okay” and sticks a price floor in the EU Customs Union at whatever VW is selling at.
Ah, now the playing field is level! Or…is it?
Yes, BYD can’t undercut VW on prices now. But it still has that cost advantage. What BYD is going to do is to spend that extra money on adding more desirable features to their car. So now, at the price floor, you’re going to have a lackluster VW model and a really spiffy BYD model. Okay, maybe VW can ride on their reputation for a bit, but at some point, if BYD is consistently putting out better cars at a given price point, that’s gonna affect consumer views.
What I expect it will do is reduce the number of people buying EVs at the lower end of the market, where VW wasn’t making an entrant, so now those consumers will probably be getting a conventional vehicle instead of an EV.
I think that the problem will be if software comes out that’s doesn’t target home PCs. That’s not impossible. I mean, that happens today with Web services. Closed-weight AI models aren’t going to be released to run on your home computer. I don’t use Office 365, but I understand that at least some of that is a cloud service.
Like, say the developer of Video Game X says “I don’t want to target a ton of different pieces of hardware. I want to tune for a single one. I don’t want to target multiple OSes. I’m tired of people pirating my software. I can reduce cheating. I’m just going to release for a single cloud platform.”
Nobody is going to take your hardware away. And you can probably keep running Linux or whatever. But…not all the new software you want to use may be something that you can run locally, if it isn’t released for your platform. Maybe you’ll use some kind of thin-client software — think telnet, ssh, RDP, VNC, etc for past iterations of this — to use that software remotely on your Thinkpad. But…can’t run it yourself.
If it happens, I think that that’s what you’d see. More and more software would just be available only to run remotely. Phones and PCs would still exist, but they’d increasingly run a thin client, not run software locally. Same way a lot of software migrated to web services that we use with a Web browser, but with a protocol and software more aimed at low-latency, high-bandwidth use. Nobody would ban existing local software, but a lot of it would stagnate. A lot of new and exciting stuff would only be available as an online service. More and more people would buy computers that are only really suitable for use as a thin client — fewer resources, closer to a smartphone than what we conventionally think of as a computer.
EDIT: I’d add that this is basically the scenario that the AGPL is aimed at dealing with. The concern was that people would just run open-source software as a service. They could build on that base, make their own improvements. They’d never release binaries to end users, so they wouldn’t hit the traditional GPL’s obligation to release source to anyone who gets the binary. The AGPL requires source distribution to people who even just use the software.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
https://calculatorshub.net/computing/fiber-latency-calculator/
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
Historically, Usenet clients tended to respond to both groups in response to articles posted to multiple newsgroups.
This tended to result in trolls doing things like posting “I’m in the market for a computer. Which is better, PC or Mac?” to comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.os.mac.advocacy with the intention of starting flamewars.
You could also just only use Macs.
I actually don’t know what the current requirement is. Back in the day, Apple used to build some of the OS — like QuickDraw — into the ROMs, so unless you had a physical Mac, not just a purchased copy of MacOS, you couldn’t legally run MacOS, since the ROM contents were copyrighted, and doing so would require infringing on the ROM copyright. Apple obviously doesn’t care about this most of the time, but I imagine that if it becomes institutionalized at places that make real money, they might.
But I don’t know if that’s still the case today. I’m vaguely recalling that there was some period where part of Apple’s EULA for MacOS prohibited running MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which would have been a different method of trying to tie it to the hardware.
searches
This is from 2019, and it sounds like at that point, Apple was leveraging the EULAs.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250646417?sortBy=rank
Posted on Sep 20, 2019 5:05 AM
The widely held consensus is that it is only legal to run virtual copies of macOS on a genuine Apple made Apple Mac computer.
There are numerous packages to do this but as above they all have to be done on a genuine Apple Mac.
- VMware Fusion - this allows creating VMs that run as windows within a normal Mac environment. You can therefore have a virtual Mac running inside a Mac. This is useful to either run simultaneously different versions of macOS or to run a test environment inside your production environment. A lot of people are going to use this approach to run an older version of macOS which supports 32bit apps as macOS Catalina will not support old 32bit apps.
- VMware ESXi aka vSphere - this is a different approach known as a ‘bare metal’ approach. With this you use a special VMware environment and then inside that create and run virtual machines. So on a Mac you could create one or more virtual Mac but these would run inside ESXi and not inside a Mac environment. It is more commonly used in enterprise situations and hence less applicable to Mac users.
- Parallels Desktop - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion but is written by Parallels instead.
- VirtualBox - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Unlike those it is free of charge. Ostensible it is ‘owned’ by Oracle. It works but at least with regards to running virtual copies of macOS is still vastly inferior to VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. (You get what you pay for.)
Last time I checked Apple’s terms you could do the following.
- Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of doing software development
- Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of testing
- Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of being a server
- Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for personal non-commercial use
No. Apple spells this out very clearly in the License Agreement for macOS. Must be installed on Apple branded hardware.
They switched to ARM in 2020, so unless their legal position changed around ARM, I’d guess that they’re probably still relying on the EULA restrictions. That being said, EULAs have also been thrown out for various reasons, so…shrugs
goes looking for the actual license text.
Yeah, this is Tahoe’s EULA, the most-recent release:
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf
Page 2 (of 895 pages):
They allow only on Apple-branded hardware for individual purchases unless you buy from the Mac Store. For Mac Store purchases, they allow up to two virtual instances of MacOS to be executed on Apple-branded hardware that is also running the OS, and only under certain conditions (like for software development). And for volume purchase contracts, they say that the terms are whatever the purchaser negotiated. I’m assuming that there’s no chance that Apple is going to grant some “go use it as much as you want whenever you want to do CI tests or builds for open-source projects targeting MacOS” license.
So for the general case, the EULA prohibits you from running MacOS wherever on non-Apple hardware.
Now my question is, who’s making that one query that leaks my domain name? Is it Apache on startup
If you’re wanting a list of DNS queries from your system, assuming that it’s DNS and not DoH, maybe:
# tcpdump port domain
Then go start Apache or whatever.
It’s “smugly”.
The point I’m making is that bash is optimized for quickly writing throwaway code. It doesn’t matter if the code written blows up in some case other than the one you’re using. You don’t need to handle edge cases that don’t apply to the one time that you will run the code. I write lots of bash code that doesn’t handle a bunch of edge cases, because for my one-off use, that edge case doesn’t arise. Similarly, if an LLMs is generating code that misses some edge case, if it’s a situation that will never arise, and that may not be a problem.
EDIT: I think maybe that you’re misunderstanding me as saying “all bash code is throwaway”, which isn’t true. I’m just using it as an example where throwaway code is a very common, substantial use case.